A friend has been sending me articles about online dating. Here is a more comprehensive article about the whole world of online dating and the various options out there. Just so you know, here are two of the more predicative questions.

Rudder [a founder of OK Cupid] has discovered, for example, that the answer to the question “Do you like the taste of beer?” is more predictive than any other of whether you’re willing to have sex on a first date. (That is, people on OK Cupid who have answered yes to one are likely to have answered yes to the other.) OK Cupid has also analyzed couples who have met on the site and have since left it. Of the 34,620 couples the site has analyzed, the casual first-date question whose shared answer was most likely to signal a shot at longevity (beyond the purview of OK Cupid, anyway) was “Do you like horror movies?”

Newt Gingrich should have known that, if he jumped into the presidential race, all his personal peccadilloes would become fodder for journalists and everyone else. And he should have known that he has a lot of peccadilloes to feed the maw. Now there is a new story out there, written by Marvin Olasky, a Christian conservative and no liberal, with the accusation that Bill Clinton knew about Gingrich's affair with the woman who became his third wife, Callista Bisek, during the 1998 impeachment imbroglio and used that information to pressure Gingrich to cool it in his criticism of Clinton. Who knows if it is true, but its mere reminder of Gingrich's tawdry behavior back then is enough to remind us all of why he should not be the GOP nominee.

Look for Pennsylvania to be the next state with a major teacher cheating scandal. What is amazing is that state officials had the evidence of suspicious erasure results back in 2009 but did little to track down the culprits except for commission more studies.

Two Yale professors, Jacob S. Hacker and Oona A. Hathaway, argue that we are having a crisis of democracy. Congress can't get things done so the President steps in to assert more executive powers through regulation or executive orders. By the way, where has that whole debate over the War Powers Act gone? The only thing Congress can seem to do when they're stuck is hand the power over to some other group like the Base Closing commission or the debt-ceiling super committee or to make things automatic like pay raises so they don't have to sully their political hopes by voting on the hard stuff.